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Nov 22, 2007

FLL Mission Overview Part 11 - Oil Barrels

Mission Information: The purpose of this mission is to simply keep the robot-operator from retrieving or "rescuing" the robot too many times. The referee penalizes a team by removing one of the barrels in the team's possesion (whether in Base, Parking Lot, or the foldable table ;-), thus causing a team to lose 10 points because each barrel in the team's possesion is worth 10 points. Also, the referre will prioritize taking white barrels before red. So, a team begins with five white barrels in Base, thus the team starts with 50 points. The team can also retrieve 3 more barrels (2 white and 1 red) from the Oil Drilling Mission. Therefore, there is a lot of strategy to consider: "Should I save time and grab the robot?" or "Should I save points and let the robot come bach to Base?"

Also, we would like to wish everybody a Happy Thanksgiving, and everybody travelling do so safely!

Richard

Jonathan's Comments: Note that no Barrels will be taken away if none are in Base. By the way, Base includes the Parking Lot only if you move the Barrels there by hand - if the robot moves the Barrels to the Parking Lot, they aren't considered to be in Base (and therefore the robot may touch them, but not the drivers).

This is the first year that the base has been in the middle, not in a corner. Thus, all the mission models are only a half-table away maximum. In previous years, my teams have always had one or two missions that they planned to pick up the robot from the far end of the table after completing a mission to save the return time. This year, my team designed all the missions with the robot returning to base on its own.

So they decided not to move the barrels out of base to "save" them. The only mission that sometimes goes awry is retrieving the truck, so they are willing to risk the 10 point penalty if they have to do a rescue there.

I personally think the 10 point penalty will make the weaker teams weaker. On the otherhand, every team starts with 50 points (last year it was 24 points).

Mission rule says: "If you rescue the robot while there are Oil Barrels IN Base, the referee takes one away . . . . If there are no Oil Barrels IN Base at the time of the rescue, there is no loss."

Does this mean that you can put the barrels in a cage and have the robot carry it around the whole time? In that case, the rescue would not occur "while" there are barrels in base, or "at the time" of the rescue.

At the end of the round, the robot returns to base with all the oil barrels intact.

The "robot carrying the barrels" scenerio was debated for quite a while in the FLL forum, but an official QA ruling decided that any scoring object that the robot was in contact with at the time of a rescue must be left on the table at the spot of the rescue. So a rescue would result in loss of barrels.

I think the time required for the robot to move the barrels out of the base and then retrieve them back to the base could be better spent on one of the other missions if your robot is unlikely to need a rescue.

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